With some additional help from Yogi, we did a webcast with O'Reilly back in December which is still up for you to view if you'd like some more background.

"You can observe a lot just by watching" aptly describes machine learning which was the subject of our first prediction. Simplifying hugely, ML is just the process of using an algorithm to examine data and come up with new insights. Initially the preserve of data scientist, ML is becoming more widely used and embedded in other tools and applications: everything from music recommendations to IT.

And speaking of IT tools, Oracle Management Cloud already embeds ML to do things like flagging unusual resource usage, identify configuration changes and forecast outages before they happen. Systems management is a classic big data problem, with lots of different data sources and formats, real-time data streams, and now the opportunity to apply sophisticated analytics to deliver benefits that weren't possible before. Expect new capabilities like that in many more products this year.

We'll do some more background posts about these predictions throughout the year. When exactly will that happen? Don't know. After all, it's tough to make predictions…